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Monday, February 1, 2010 A fellow photographer, Catherine Jardine, and I planned to visit Box Canyon just east of Mecca, Calif. The entrance to the canyon was closed due to road damage from a recent storm. We did take a few photos of Painted Canyon from the road’s edge before moving on. They are included in this article’s photo slide show.  The north end of the Salton Sea is just south of Mecca by a couple of miles. I was driving and didn’t give Catherine much choice of where we were going. I went to the Marina at North Shore, which is now being refurbished by Riverside County. It is one of my favorite places for photography, and is now one of hers. I have used this location for several photo shoots for models and will include them in the slide show. In one photo of model Jessica Galvan, you will be able to see the old marina before refurbishing started. Other models include Kearstin McClintock with the sword at Salton Sea and Brittney Hills with a sword in Box Canyon, who I previously photographed.Our first and only stop was just north of the Marina off Highway 111 at North Shore. We parked at the first jetty and simply enjoyed shooting in the soft magenta light of the setting sun.  We enjoyed and photographed the presence of pelicans, seagulls, great egrets and an eared grebe. That is just a pittance in regard to the 380 types of birds sighted at the Salton Sea in a year‘s time. The ambient light was soft and cool. I used a Canon and a 55 to 250mm zoom lens and set my ISO at 1600. Catherine shot with a Nikon and an 18 to 200 zoom lens set at ISO 400. Some photos I have enhanced with an easy downloadable free program called “Picasa” from Google. It is great program that has simple editing and retouch tools but lacks capabilities like resizing images or cut and pasting within images.My next trip with Catherine will be to the Morongo Canyon Reserve in Morongo, Calif on Highway 62. Catherine and I will let you know how this went. To see more photos of the Salton Sea by Renee Vargas and Cathy Jardine, click here. For more about birds of the Salton Sea, click here. For more about the Salton Sea, click here.
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